Statement

The body is at the center of my art practice. I am particularly interested how experience maps itself across the human face and body. Chronic illness and age carve their distinctive marks into the flesh. My work is informed by second wave feminist ideas about embodiment and medical humanities. By using the faces and bodies of people living with cancer, myself included, as subjects, I am both portraying specific people as well as chronicling larger cultural narratives about medicine, illness and age. While my images always begin with a representational photograph or painting, I often digitally fracture them to signify the experience of medical and pharmaceutical interventions. The fragmentation occurs with disjointed images, the structural splits of triptychs and polyptychs, and broken pieces of text. These fragmented forms provoke new insight into the experience of living with a non-normative body. Text is digitally integrated into some of these works as both a visual element as well as a site of meaning. Bodies become defined by text. The cancerous body is written on by cultural attitudes towards cancer, as well as the individual’s daily experience of the disease and its treatment.

I am a mixed media digital artist combining digital painting, photography and traditional media together in the computer. Sometimes I start with a pastel, a monoprint or a sketch, sometimes with my own studio shot photo reference. I use a variety of digital apps to explore the visual possibilities. Layering of different pictorial elements allows me to express the complexities of my experience, feeling and ideas. I attempt to make a picture of how the reality of illness & age happen on so many levels at the same time. Printing onto a variety of media - canvas, metal, rice paper and now, canvas -moves the image into the analogue world. The viewer is able to engage with the physical presence of the image beyond the limitations of the screen.

Bio

I am an independent artist, writer and critical thinker. I was born in Ireland, grew up in the United States and have lived in Canada since 1969 except for 2 years in the American southwest. I attended Sheridan College School of Design and Crafts in Ontario and trained in Ceramics. I began doing clay and plastic figurative sculpture in the early 70s. I worked as a potter first in a factory in New Mexico and then at my own pottery in Ontario. Along the way I wandered into feminism where I became involved in the alternative theatre scene and creative writing. I have worked as a cook, a counselor for abused women, an Outward Bound instructor, a teacher and a web designer. In the mid 90s I met Photoshop 3 and fell in love with the visual possibilities of digital art. Fo many years I taught Digital Art at Humber College. Now I make mixed media digital images in Toronto.